Roe is About Women’s Rights

According to the Pew Research Forum, the majority of survey respondents under 30-years old answering questions about abortion attitudes revealed the following:

41 percent thought the case might have to do with the death penalty, the environment or could not name the subject matter and 16 percent thought it had to do with school desegregation,

Here’s the really depressing kicker: 68 percent of Republicans under 30 knew the content of the Roe decision compared with only 57 percent of Democrats,

A full 74 percent of those who support overturning Roe consider abortion a “crucial issue” or “one of many crucial issues.”

Among supporters? 31 percent.

Both Michelle Bornstein and Sarah Kliff had to type these words out, see them on a screen and push a “send” button after they wrote them for The Washington Post. I just did it and think I’m breaking into hives.

Just to be clear, Roe V. Wade IS NOT, to quote a Twitter friend, “Two ways to cross a river.”

As Gail Collins once pointed out, in 1912, maybe in between the jail time she served for breaking the law and providing safe birth control to women, Margaret Sanger (also charged with obscenity for talking about her work) wrote an article called Things That Every Girl Should Know. They’re things Every BOY SHOULD KNOW, too. And this is one of them.

It means we don’t go to jail for something all women, by virtue of having female bodies, must seriously think about during 30 years of fertility.

It means that you, or people you know, (at least one-third of all women by the age of 45) who have had one—for whatever reason—have been able to safely and legally.

Turns out that these facts are a really tough pill for some people to swallow. Which is why some states, like Mississippi, have made it all but impossible for a woman to actually find an abortion clinic or doctor. And other states, like Texas, North Dakota, Virginia, Arizona are doing the same. In Alabama last week, the Supreme Court ruled that fetuses are “children.” Both 2011 and 2012 were record years in legislative attempts to erode or eliminate Roe.

Prior to Roe, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, “between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occur[red] annually in the United States. As many as 5,000 to 10,000 women died per year following illegal abortions and many others suffered severe physical and psychological injury.“

Roe is a critically important interpretation of our constitution that extended rights to women that they were previously deprived of. Just because we’re humans born in the United States doesn’t mean we miraculously don’t have human rights issues. The right to choose, if and when and how, to reproduce is a fundamental human right. Roe protects that right for American women. Something they did not have before.

And, Roe did more than that. The right to make decisions regarding our own bodies, to manage our own reproduction has practical pluses. We get to participate in the world more equally. Go to school. Get degrees. Get and keep jobs. Run for office. Take care of our families to the best of our abilities. Leave abusive spouses. Not be prey to the vagaries of other people’s actions or wills.

The degree to which we’ve failed to educate people, as we clearly haven’t, on the legal ramifications of overturning or whittling away at Roe, is shocking.

Some people, usually the can’t tell a pregnancy test from a swizzle stick set, think Roe should be overturned as a matter of state rights. Please. What about, say, interracial marriage? Want to do that, too? Or maybe slavery. THAT’s a good idea.

I know that the ethics of pregnancy are complicated. All people do, especially pregnant people. According to Roe, restrictions on abortion in second and their trimesters could only be established if the state could demonstrate a “compelling interest” in potential life. But, while everyone might agree that ethical compassion is a necessary component of decisions regarding how pregnancies are managed, to date, Roe‘s opponents have yet to demonstrate that they understand that women themselves have “compelling interests”—like life, liberty, autonomy. The only way you can justify a position in which a woman does not make her own abortion decisions is if you believe she is not ethically and morally capable as a matter of her gender. It is THIS idea—that women are fully autonomous, morally independent, capable human beings, that opponents of Roe have been continuously attacking since the dawn of recorded time. The last 40 years of relentless legislative, judicial, religiously-injected conservative political activism focused on women and their bodies is just this generation’s fundamentalist backlash against a modernity that seeks not only to say women are equal, but allow them to act and be equal.

My intuition, based on these surveys, is that many people are assuming that women’s fundamental rights are and always have been as inalienable and fundamental as men’s in this country. History clearly demonstrates that this is not the case. Why do you think we don’t talk about “reproductive rights” for men? The “norm” (ie. just plain old “rights”) is male. We have to qualify the rights with a “reproductive” only when we’re talking about male-deviant females. Simply because fetuses are not part of men’s bodies does not make them any less part of women’s. All of our laws are structured to reflect a world in which reproduction takes place and is managed outside of a body. Yet that is only the case for men. Roe acknowledges the difference. It refuses to pit the rights of a fetus against those of the woman for this reason. Roe also acknowledges a related fact: until its passage women’s bodies, legally speaking, functioned like production facilities, holding tanks, regulated environments, the property of the men who impregnated them. Do I really have to go on here???

The fact remains today, in regard to Roe, as it did in 2005 only perhaps even more true, that the rights I am describing remain secure, really secure, in only 20 US states. It doesn’t inspire confidence that the younger a survey respondent was, the less important they thought a woman’s right to an abortion was. This is entirely understandable result of not teaching the history of women’s rights as civil rights, applauding the accomplishments of those that fought for women’s freedoms and equality, or acknowledging in mainstream media that feminist activism as ongoing.

It’s especially important now because the problem we have is not that Roe will be overturned. It is that opponents have been degrading and dismantling Roe by proxy since 1973. And the more public opinion seems to turn against them, the more aggressive and systematic they seem to be. They are using laws never intended to apply to women and abortion to intimidate, investigate, arrest, prosecute and imprison us based on the same views that inform their anti-Roe agenda. So, while Roe should have meant that Angela Carder didn’t die, she did. Or that Laura Pemberton wasn’t taken from her home, tied to a bed and forced to have Cesarean surgery, she was. Or that Bei Bei Shuai wouldn’t face murder charges because she was filled with despair while pregnant and tried to commit suicide, but she is. Roe was originally based on “four constitutional pillars” of which only two remain today. The result is that states can, and are, proposing and passing fetal “rights” statutes in defiance of women’s constitutional rights, medical facts, scientific research and with no regard for the complicated, often dangerous, urgent contexts that are unique to every pregnancy. Poorer, darker women pay the highest price.

There should be posters on every school campus that read: Roe is what allows American girls and women of childbearing age to plan their families and live without fear of unwanted pregnancies, debilitating infections or death caused by illegal abortions or complications caused by pregnancy and childbirth.

Given the fact that one in three U.S. women will have an abortion by the time they are 45 either you or someone you know has had or will have an abortion. It’s no one’s business why. Roe v. Wade isn’t about women’s choices, it’s about their rights. All girls and women have the right to make decisions for themselves. That’s what Roe is.

As an unfortunate resident of Alabama, I’m TERRIFIED at the most recent ruling that women are nearly regulated to being nothing but fetus incubators. It’s horrifying. Our local clinic is overrun on Saturdays with people who want to take away MY RIGHT to do what is best for MY HEALTH – yet these same people aren’t adopting children that already need homes, aren’t helping feed or fund the orphanage in town, they’re just… bullying women.

And why? Religion, best as I can tell. They believe their religion tells them… No, compels them… to bully women, and treat women as inferior.

Notice there are no restrictions on men’s healthcare.

ragequitter

I want to say you’re wrong about my generation, but spending so much time among them slaps the words out of my mouth before I can speak. Primary school in southern California and under graduate work in Alabama gave me about 12 years worth of evidence, proving to me that rational thought is waning in my generation. Many became short sighted and so limited in scope that the immediate future and the world around them (as they saw to frame it) only mattered. I feel the effects are showing through today, not just on Roe; but the effects on Roe are very severe.

Rational thought replaced with indoctrination from unforgiving religions, making absurd promises of rewards for obedience. Selfishness, ignorance, impatience, and a need to punish make for a terrible view of the world. Through that tiny lens they see an imagined tragedy falling upon the women that get abortions and the terminated pregnancy. If that lens was snatched from them and their heads forced up, made to look at the world as it is, they would see the real tragedy. The one they created.

I want to think exposure to fact can change minds, but again, I know better than that.

arekushieru

Really? Because the majority of people I see trying to whittle away women’s rights are the older generation, not the younger generation. And where do you think the majority of the values reflected in the younger generation most likely come from? The older generation. Thanks.